Loretta Howard Gallery is pleased to present paintings from Cleve Gray’s Considering All Possible World’s series. The artist began this body of work in the 1990’s exploring the various themes that he unearthed for over a decade. Writer David Ebony elaborates on the work in his essay “Cleve Gray’s Parallel Universe” printed in the accompanying exhibition catalog:
The series is clearly inspired by Chinese and Japanese calligraphy, particularly Zen painting. But Gray’s gestures do not refer to any specific script or writing; they have no relationship to graffiti and exist wholly in the realm of pure painting. Some of the works allude to nature or architecture. Crane (1990), for instance, features a sinuous black line rising up through a horizontally bisected field of yellow on the bottom and light grey at the top. The elegant black shape could indicate a bird in flight or a towering derrick. The spare, hazy geometry of the background seems to bear an art-historical reference to his contemporaries, such as Mark Rothko or his friend Barnett Newman.